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Barack Obama recently met with oil tycoon turned alternative energy advocate T. Boone Pickens, who funded devastating attacks on 2004 Democratic White House pick John Kerry.

Thomas Boone Pickens, Jr. is an American business man who chairs the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator during the 1980s. With an estimated current net worth of about $3 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 117th-richest person in America and ranked 369th in the world. Pickens has given more than $700 million away to charity.

Pickens has begun speaking out on the issue of peak oil, claiming that world oil production is about to enter a period of irrevocable decline. He has called for the construction of more nuclear power plants, the use of natural gas to power the country’s transportation systems, and the promotion of alternative energy. Pickens’ involvement with the natural gas fueling campaign is long-running. He formed Pickens Fuel Corp. in 1997 and began touting natural gas as the best vehicular fuel alternative because it’s a domestic resource that, among many advantages, is clean (Natural Gas Vehicles or NGVs emit up to 30% less pollution than gasoline or diesel vehicles) and reduces foreign oil consumption. Reincorporated as Clean Energy in 2001, the company now owns and operates natural gas fueling stations from British Columbia to the Mexican border.

The current Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama also declared that Pickens has a lot longer track record than that, when asked about how it felt to be meeting the man who “swiftboated” Kerry’s campaign, as the two headed into a brief tete-a-tete at a resort hotel in Reno, Nevada.

According to Obama, Pickens is a legendary entrepreneur and his stand on energy issues is something not to be taken lightly. Obama further clarified that one the things he thought it was necessary to unify the United States around was having an intelligent energy policy.

Pickens in 2004 donated millions to a shadowy group of Vietnam War veterans calling themselves “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” who ran ads questioning Kerry’s honesty and his record in Vietnam, where he was wounded three times and awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars for valor.

The former Texas oilman has since launched a “Pickens Plan” to wean the United States off its dependence on foreign oil, investing in wind farms and stumping for alternative energy at the US Congress in Washington.

In June 2007, Pickens announced the intention to build the world’s largest wind farm by installing large wind turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties. The project would produce up to four gigawatts of electricity. Pickens’ Mesa Power LP will undertake the construction. If completed, the farm would generate more than five times the 735 megawatts produced at the present largest such farm near Abilene.

“Everybody knows that if we keep on going on the same track that we’re going, that we are giving our wealth away, we’re funding both sides in the war on terror,” the Illinois senator said.

Obama further stressed that over the longer term, the United States government was simply going to be putting enormous pressure on ordinary families in America who are simply not going to be able to afford skyrocketing gasoline prices and home heating prices. Therefore, it is very necessary that the country is unified around the issues of energy.

Pickens did not speak to reporters, but reportedly smiled awkwardly as Obama was asked about his activities during the 2004 campaign.

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